mrtedbear

I'm not sure the other commenters claiming all these features are attack vectors actually read the list?

How is the barcode detection API a security risk for example? Having it implemented would be amazing for web apps.

Also there's features like deep linking into PWAs that ought to be pretty basic PWA functionality that's not on this list that even Safari on Mac OSX has but Safari on iOS doesn't. Even the add to home screen menu option is deliberately made hard to find.

Apple doing this for the benefit of the user is one of the less likely hypotheses.

I think using the Quantified Scientist's YouTube reviews as reference for the quality of sensors is misleading.

He primarily tests the devices on just his own body type, and often doesn't test long enough for the device to adapt to him (some devices take a few weeks to "learn" your body).

He does make disclaimers about the above, but people seem to take the stats he presents as gospel.

The biggest transformation was getting an RH Mereo chair. For me it's solved the back and leg issues caused by poor posture.

It's the first chair to make me sit comfortably & correctly [1].

Also transformational were:

* Corne split keyboard

* Benq e-reading lamp

* Galaxy Tab S8+

* Sit/stand desk

* Cheap foldable laptop stand from AliExpress (laptops by default seem terrible for posture).

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/08/13/6360250...

I concur with the article. I recently got a ThinkPad X13 gen 2 (AMD) in one of Lenovo's heavily discounted sales. It was a pleasant surprise to discover how great a laptop it is, especially considering the price.

I do. I use toolboxes for pretty much all my development. I've scripted the setup each type of toolbox I use, so they can be reproduced. I use a terminal editor (neovim), but I think it's possible to run vscode from a toolbox too[1].

For graphical apps (browsers etc.) the flatpaks are very handy.

The above setup means I don't really need to layer much in the OS, mainly drivers and common terminal utilities.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/107lvlf/silverblue_...

I found Regolith nice to use except for the configuration. It seems to split the configuration into a bunch of files rather than just a standard i3 config file.

Also switched to Silverblue and love it.

Ubuntu wasn't especially bad, it was more that Silverblue made so much sense. It fixed the issues I was having with other distros where messiness would creep into my setup over time.

I also tried NixOS, but it felt too rigid. Silverblue offered the same benefits of immutability without a loss of flexibility.

Thanks for checking it out, and the helpful feedback. I'll fix it.

There's a few motivations. One was me noticing how I'd somehow just accumulated stuff over time, and I've seen the longer term result of that with my parents. So I wanted to be on top of what I'm getting and why, how long I'm using it for and also how I'm disposing of it.

A second motivation is to use others' lists to make more considered decisions.

And thirdly I'm curious to figure out what might be the minimal set of things one needs to live comfortably.

And cheers, I'm working on an update to Synced which I think will be quite cool! (coming in the next couple of months).

[edit: fixed password issue]

I decided to itemize all my possessions and recently built a tool to do so:

https://litemize.com

I'm in the process of itemizing everything,

https://litemize.com/mrtedbear

And my aim is to keep the number below 200 items (excluding books) and 500 items in total, and to minimize purchase and disposal activity.

I've found Lilian Weng's blog a great resource to get an intuition for the maths behind popular models and concepts. https://lilianweng.github.io/

Sure, QMK files are here.

https://github.com/tss101/clarityqmkkeymap

It's in a bit of a rough state (one folder is for a OLED + RGB Corne r2g, and another is a currently messy adaptation for a Ferris Sweep)

The keymap itself is pretty straightforward. As rgoulter guessed it's just a modification of Miryoku (https://github.com/manna-harbour/miryoku), with some tweaks I made to keep functionally similar layers "together". E.g. the mouse key and navigation key layers are mirror images of each other. And there's a numpad layer, with nested symbols and function key layers that stack from the initial numpad layer. I also designed it to share the load between both hands as much as possible.

100%. Going in I had no idea how all-consuming it would get.

The keyboard rabbit-hole gets pretty deep. I started off wanting a nicer typing experience, and ended up realising so much about the traditional keyboard designs didn't make sense to me (here's someone nicely summing up the reasons why https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrska7UU7BE).

For me the optimum is a split 34-key keyboard (the open-source Ferris Sweep https://github.com/davidphilipbarr/Sweep) with a custom keymap firmware (QMK).

Going even deeper, you can generate a PCB layout that's personalised to the shape of your hands: https://github.com/ergogen/ergogen

I'm a Ubuntu user but always install the PopOS shell for the wonderful tiling window manager.

It's such a convenient way to manage the desktop space and credit to System76 for making it available to other Gnome-based distros.

https://support.system76.com/articles/pop-shell/

BenQ WiT e-Reading Desk Lamp

https://www.benq.eu/en-uk/lamps/desklamp/wit.html

I bought it at the start of the pandemic and have been very happy with it.

Came to say this too.

Portal 2 is my all time favourite game and the most fun I've had playing multiplayer.

All the aspects of the games gel together so wonderfully to make a really immersive experience. I just loved how the backstory was unveiled as you went through the game (especially Portal 2). Plus Stephen Merchant as Wheatley is iconic.

I looked at the code check. The one 25% difference is in an intermediate variable (peak beds). The two differences of 10% are 39k deaths vs 43k deaths, and 100k deaths vs 110k deaths. The other differences are less than 5%. I can see why the author of the code check would reach the conclusion he did.

I have given a possible explanation for the variation, that doesn't require buggy code, in my previous comments.

An alternative hypothesis is that it's bug driven, but very competent people (including eminent programmers like John Cormack) seem to have vouched for it on that front. I'd say this puts a high burden of proof on detractors.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01685-y

I took a look at point 3. and that extract from the code check is correct. Assuming they did one realisation I was curious why. It would be unlikely to be an oversight.

Luckily they published their reasoning on the number of realisations in the supplementary materials of a prior paper cited in report 9 (citation 5): https://www.nature.com/articles/nature04795#MOESM28

"Numbers of realisations & computational resources: It is essential to undertake sufficient realisation to ensure ensemble behaviour of a stochastic is well characterised for any one set of parameter values. For our past work which examined extinction probabilities, this necessitates very large numbers of model realizations being generated. In the current work, only the timing of the initial introduction of virus into a country is potentially highly variable – once case incidence reaches a few hundred cases per day, dynamics are much closer to deterministic."

So looks like they did consider the issue, and the number of realisations needed is dependent on the variable of interest in the model. The code check appears to back their justification up, "Small variations (mostly under 5%) in the numbers were observed between Report 9 and our runs."

Yeah unintended non-determinism would be a problem. But I don't think I saw a good source regarding this being the case at the time.

I saw the John Cormack review which suggested there was nothing overly troubling in the code, https://mobile.twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/125487236876...

The other takedown reviews focused on the fact that there was non-determinism despite a seed, without understanding that's not necessarily a problem.

Agreed on the second point about not having a seed, but I added the "assuming you have used a seed" caveat because sometimes people do use the seed for some reproducible execution modes (even multi-thread/process ones), which are fine, and it's just easier to randomly vary the seed generation rather than remove it all together when running in a non-deterministic mode.

I reckon the PRNG seeding in such a case might be used during development/testing.

So, run the code with a seed in a non distributed way (e.g. in R turn off all parallelism), and then the results should be the same in every run.

Then once this test output is validated, depending on the nature of the model, it can be run in parallel, and guarantees of deterministic behaviour will go, but that's ok.

I didn't develop the model, so can't really say anything in depth beyond the published materials.

I just found it odd at the time how this specific detail was incorrectly used by some to claim the model was broken/irredeemably buggy.

Edit: Actually, in general, perhaps there's one other situation where the seed might be useful, assuming you have used a seed in the first place. Depending on the distributed environment, there's no guarantee that the processes or random number draws will be run in the same order. But it might be that in most cases they're in the same order. This might bias the distribution of the samples you take. So you might want to change the seed on every run to protect yourself from such nasty phantom effects.

At the time, critics of the model were claiming the model was buggy because multiple runs would produce different results. My comment above explains why that is not evidence for the model being buggy.

Report 9 talks about parameters being modeled as probability distributions, i.e. its a stochastic model. I doubt they would draw conclusions from a single run, as the code is drawing a single sample from a probability distribution. And, if you look at the paper describing the original model (cited in report 9), they do test the model with multiple runs. On top of that they perform sensitivity analyses to check erroneous assumptions aren't driving the model.

I have spent time in academia, but I'm not an academic, and don't feel any obligation to fly the flag for academia.

Regarding the politics, contrast how the people who forensically examined Ferguson's papers were so ready to accept the competing (and clearly incorrect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKh6kJ-RSMI) results from Sunetra Gupta's group.

Fair point about academic code being messy. It's a big issue, but the incentives are not there at the moment to write quality code. I assume you're a programmer - if you wanted to be the change you want to see, you could join an academic group, reduce your salary by 3x-4x, and be in a place where what you do is not a priority.

"The model generated totally different output every time you ran it, even with fixed seeds." - I remember seeing code takedowns of the model from anti-lockdown people who repeatedly cite this issue.

But there is a valid reason for this to happen, and it doesn't mean bugs in the code. If the code is run in a distributed way (multiple threads, processes or machines), which it was, the order of execution is never guaranteed. So even setting the seed will produce a different set of results if the outcomes of each separate instance depend on each other further in the computation.

There are ways to mitigate this, depending on the situation and the amount of slowdown that's acceptable. Since this model was collecting outcomes to create a statistical distribution, rather than a single deterministic number, it didn't need to.

The fact the model was also drawing distributions also will be why different runs produced possibly vastly different results. Those results would be at different ends of a distribution. Only distributions are sampled and used, not single numbers.

Regarding the GCSE level comment, my concern was the opposite, that the model was trying to model too much, and that inaccuracies would build up. No model is perfect (including this one) and the more assumptions made the larger the room for error. But they validated the model with some simpler models as a sanity check.

My view on criticisms of the model were that they were more politically motivated, and the code takedowns were done by people who may have been good coders, but didn't know enough about statistical modeling.

Here's John Cormack's take on the model, he saw and cleaned up the original version before it was released. https://mobile.twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/125487236876...

True Tales of American Life - it's a collection of mostly autobiographical true stories, submitted by everyday Americans as part of NPR's National Story Project and edited by Paul Auster.

Standouts for me were Klara and the Sun (Kazuo Ishiguro), Exhalation (Ted Chiang), Invisible Planets (an anthology of Chinese sci-fi short stories, translated by Ken Liu) and Longitude (Dava Sobel).

I also finally got around to reading Cixin Liu's Three Body series, and although not perfect, there's so many interesting ideas in them.

Veritasium is fantastic, I can't think of many current or past TV shows that are of a similar quality to his videos. A while back he did a video of his own startup story, which was very cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1tFT4smd6E

I forget which day it was, but I came across a day with a much higher number of food poisoning incidents.

It could be that there was something happening that day, or maybe it happened to people who were more likely to report it. Somewhat related, it would be cool to see if the areas of pest sightings correlate with food poisoning incidents.

The Benq Wit lamp has been great for me:

https://www.benq.eu/en-uk/lamps/desklamp/wit.html

I also changed up my desk for a sit-stand one with much larger surface area. The other changes were a monitor arm ( https://www.bachmann.com/en/products/monitor-arms/zg1-monito... ) and a Hag Capisco chair.

The end result has been a massive improvement in comfort and posture.

Plus AFAIK much of the IBD Analysts' time is spent on preparing the PowerPoint presentations that higher ups present to clients. It seems to function like a form of hazing.

Just checked, seems to work for me on Safari and Chrome